When a specific frame (image data in a amount of one screen) on an unknown storage location in movie data stored on a storage medium is searched by a data search apparatus, the data search apparatus normally reads the movie data on the storage medium sequentially from a start storage location and displays them on a display unit. Viewing the display screen, the user waits for appearance of a desired frame. In such a sequential search method, the closer to the last part of the storage medium is the storage location of the desired frame, the more time is taken until the user finds the desired frame.
Then, a data search apparatus is proposed (Japanese Patent Application Laying-open No. 32473/1990) in which the movie data are previously divided into a plurality of blocks, a frame representing each block is displayed as an icon, and the user nominates a desired icon to specify the movie data set of the block shown by the nominated icon to be searched.
In the method of Japanese Patent Application Laying-open No. 32473/1990, it is assumed that the data to be searched are previously divided into a plurality of partial regions. And a method was explained such that a region to be searched is narrowed in one of the partial regions. However, this method involves a problem in that a region stretching over a plurality of partial regions cannot be specified as a searching target at a same timing. Therefore, an inefficient search is required such that the partial region which may contain the objective data is searched one by one. A second problem of this method is that only an interface for narrowing the region to be searched is provided. Therefore, when it is found that the objective data are absent in the section as a result of search, it is necessary to specify the entire partial region as a region to be searched and narrow again the region and by this, the efficiency of search work is considerably reduced. Furthermore, a problem exists such that when a region including a number of representative frames is specified as a region to be searched, it is necessary to nominate a number of icons and then operation requires a tedious work.